Theatre of the Oppressed as a Martial Art. Theatre, Community, Pedagogy and Politics.

The Theatre of the Oppressed (TO) and the aesthetic vision of Augusto Boal are deeply connected with the link between theatre and public space. TO is a social and political theatre method forged by the Brazilian author Augusto Boal (1931-2009), but is also the product of a historical contextualization that led Boal and his collaborators to seek aesthetic answers to the limitations of freedom they experienced. Boal’s theatre is thus configured as a space of elaboration and struggle between a contingency – characterized by injustice and conflict – and an attempt at developing meaningful trajectories capable of exploring reality in depth, in the process also revealing what remained hidden and possible paths of transformation.